Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) - Softcover

An important contribution to growing scholarship on women's participation in literary cultures, this essay collection concentrates on cross-national communities of letters to offer a comparative and international approach to early modern women's writing. The essays gathered here focus on multiple literatures from several countries, ranging from Italy and France to the Low Countries and England. Individual essays investigate women in diverse social classes and life stages, ranging from siblings and mothers to nuns to celebrated writers; the collection overall is invested in crossing geographic, linguistic, political, and religious borders and exploring familial, political, and religious communities. Taken together, these essays offer fresh ways of reading early modern women's writing that consider such issues as the changing cultural geographies of the early modern world, women's bilingualism and multilingualism, and women's sense of identity mediated by local, regional, national, and transnational affiliations and conflicts.

Julie Campbell (English, Eastern Illinois University) is the editor and translator of Isabella Andreini's La Mirtilla (2002) and the author of Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe (2006). Her research focuses on Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature with an emphasis on Continental and English women writers. Anne Larsen (French, Hope College) has published articles and book chapters on French Renaissance and seventeenth-century women writers and is the editor and translator of From Mother and Daughter: Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of the Dames des Roches (2006). She is currently investigating the writings of Anna Maria van Schurman on women's education.